


Not Quite a Homecoming

by mumblefox



Series: Across, Around, and Upside Down [2]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: M/M, Memory Loss, Missing Scene, asexual Keith
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-02
Updated: 2017-01-02
Packaged: 2018-09-14 02:16:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9153100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mumblefox/pseuds/mumblefox
Summary: A lot must have happened between escaping the Garrison and the morning introductions that started them on the path to becoming Paladins.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Second in my Voltron S1 series, this fic's irreverent working title was 'there are days and then there are DAYS amirite'

 

The overloaded grav bike glided to a slow, whining stop at the bottom of the dune. Boots hit sand as the pilot leapt off first, but they didn’t go far; the bike stayed active, just in case it was still needed. It struggled to hover, to compensate for weight distribution while its passengers disembarked, feet sinking and sliding as they carried a heavy load between them. When none of its passengers remained, it went idle, closing its vents against the gritty wind. Its driver sensor watched for a pilot’s approach, but all it picked up was five bodies moving together, moving away. The overtaxed bike settled, at last, onto its charging station with a tired whirr of its motor as it powered down.

The dunes slept beneath the stars. After a few moments, they shifted sand back over the footprints as though they had never been there at all.

Inside the shack, its usual sole occupant turned on a lamp.

The three Garrison kids blinked in the sudden light, and Shiro did not. His head still hung low between Lance and the big guy, and Keith scrubbed a hand through his hair, still not quite able to believe he wasn’t dreaming.

“Okay, uh, we can put him here,” he said, pulling back the blanket on the couch that served as his bed. He hoped nobody would notice the duct tape patches or the suspicious dark blotches left from its previous owner, but the eyebrow Lance shot him said he had.

He’d never been more aware of how dingy his place was. He looked around in the dim lamplight at his table (a plank of old wood on uneven cinderblocks), his corkboard (a messy cluster of pins, research, scraps of yarn, and sticky notes) and at his stacks of printouts, books, recording equipment, old rolled maps in a ragged box - everything here was dusty and scuffed and unkempt.

He wondered if that was how he looked. He’d been on his own a long time.

The strange reality of his house being suddenly filled with people made his hands itch. The big guy was standing in front of his corkboard, one corner of the cover sheet lifted, investigating. The guy in the green jacket was tucking the blanket around Shiro. And Lance -

“Glad to see you’re moving up in the world, buddy. You’ve got yourself a really nice...house. Hobo shack. Dingy hovel?”

The big guy turned his head towards them without looking away from the board. “Hey, no judging. I think it’s a really nice hovel.”

“I mean, I’m judging a little bit,” said the little guy from where he was prodding Shiro’s arm.

The arm.

Keith hadn’t even noticed it until they’d gotten Shiro off the bike. He’d been too busy staring at his face, at the new scar, at the shock of his white hair. When they’d carried him out, the arm had been over Lance’s shoulders and not his.

Even now, the simple fact of Shiro being here was making reality tilt beneath him.

It was something he couldn’t think about too closely. The past months sat in his bones, heavy, heavy. And now it was all draining away. If it went too quickly, he thought he might just collapse.

He’d been quiet too long. Lance tucked his hands into his armpits and rocked back on his heels. “So...whenever Keith is done spacing out, we should probably figure out what we do now.”

“We wait for him to wake up,” the green guy said. “He’s the Kerberos pilot. Maybe he knows what happened to the crew.”

Keith’s head whipped around. “We’re not _interrogating him_ ,” he snapped. “Look at him. Whatever happened, it wasn’t good. We’re gonna give him time to adjust, and we’re not gonna make him talk before he’s ready.”

The air in the house stretched thin between them all. Keith was staring down the green guy, who bristled back at him. Something about his expression suddenly seemed very familiar, but Keith was too irritated to try and place it.

“Hey, uh, we never introduced ourselves,” said the big guy, and Keith turned his frown in his direction. He held his hands up, placating, and Keith let his anger flash through him, quick as wildfire. “Easy, man. I agree with you about Shiro, but we might as well be friendly about it. I’m Hunk.”

He didn’t go for the handshake, and Keith shifted back, unwinding a little despite himself. “Nice to meet you," he said flatly, then turned away. "And you - you’re Lance, right?”

“Yeah, nice try, but you already admitted you recognized me.”

“I recognized your loud mouth. Never knew your name before.”

“I’m Pidge,” grumbled the last of the Garrison crew, and he turned back to an examination of Shiro’s arm. Keith kept an eye on him, but he was treating the task with admirable delicacy, and Keith was too tired to keep being angry.

Hunk clapped his hands together purposefully. “Well, alright, now that’s outta the way. Let us know how we can help. You probably don’t have food for five here, right? We can go pick up some water and rations from the Garrison. Find Shiro something to change into.”

“Well, no offense, but I didn’t need your help before and I don’t need it now. Have a nice walk back to the Garrison, but you don’t need to come back.”

Pidge raised a caustic eyebrow. “Yeah, not happening.”

Keith shrugged, choosing to show them indifference over what he actually felt, which was confusion. Driving people away had always been something of a specialty of Keith’s. It had never been this hard to do, except one time, the one time it mattered. Maybe that meant this was a good sign - maybe they were refusing to leave for a reason, and it would be okay.

It’s how it had happened with Shiro. He’d always been the exception to every rule. Maybe it’s time there was more than one.

He’d been silent too long again. Lance stretched, exaggerated a yawn. “Well, as the obvious leader of the group, I say we’re staying, and that we should get some food and then get some rest.”

Hunk looked up from where he was rummaging in Pidge’s backpack. Pidge was too absorbed in Shiro’s arm to notice. “In what way are you the obvious leader?”

“I’m the pilot. That means I get lead.”

“I’m a pilot,” Keith said drily, and Lance shook a finger at him.

“You _were_ a pilot. You got kicked out, I got rank, boom. Leader.”

“It’s my house.”

“Okay, first of all, English isn’t even my first language and I know that this is barely a garden shed, let alone a house. Second, I don’t think you squatting in a shack in the desert qualifies you for much of anything beyond, I dunno, getting lice.”

“Although, hello, we’re technically the same rank.” Hunk zipped the backpack closed. “And I say we get some supplies. We’re gonna be here for a few days.”

“Probably more,” Pidge muttered. “It’s not like we can go back to the Garrison when it’s on lockdown, and it might not be lifted until they get Shiro back or give up on him.”

Keith huffed a bitter laugh. “Well, they were pretty quick to do it before.”

Pidge went quiet. Keith could tell he'd said something that bothered him, didn’t care. “If it’s still on lockdown, we can’t access my backup supplies anyway. I’ve got a storage locker in outbuilding six with water, rations, backup power packs. And there’s a bunch of Shiro’s stuff that I saved from the incinerator. Doesn’t help if we can’t get to it.”

“Oh, I can go,” said Hunk. “If I show up without Lance they usually let me go wherever I want.”

“What?” Lance said. “How did you manage that?”

“Do you remember how I always say that we should follow at least some rules? That’s how, Lance. I follow rules.”

Keith had to give in. He’d been steamrolled, but when it was Hunk doing it, he didn’t mind too much. “It’s locker 914, right at the back. The code is all threes. Bring everything,” Keith found himself saying. “You can take the bike. Just...don’t tell anyone about Shiro, okay?”

Hunk went for the fist bump as he headed for the door, and Keith, out of reflex, bumped back. Hunk grinned at him. “Hey, we’re on the same team, man. I’ll be back soon.” He turned, pointed at the group with both hands as he backed out the door. “No fighting while I’m gone.”

They felt the thud of his boots as he hit the two stairs, and Lance kicked the door shut behind him. An awkward silence settled over the room. Outside, the grav bike cycled to life and whirred quietly away.

The little guy grabbed a notebook out of his backpack and settled at the table, opening up a blank page and starting to sketch. “We’ll wait for him to wake up and see how he feels. I promise to leave him be, okay? You can stop glaring.” On the page, an exploded diagram of Shiro’s elbow joint started to take shape.

“There we go, tension resolved,” said Lance. “The benefits of good leadership are manifold.”

“You didn’t do anything,” Keith said.

Lance ignored him, stretching theatrically and settling onto the floor. He leaned his head against a stack of machinery and closed his eyes. “Nothing left to do but wait,” he said. “I’m napping. Sleeping? It’s like four in the morning.”

“King Lance has spoken,” said green jacket. Keith had already forgotten his name. He rested his chin on his hand, glanced between Shiro’s arm and his sketch, blearily erased a line and redrew it. His head dipped lower and lower over the page.

After a moment, Keith went over. He pretended to be looking at the sketch, but no one was paying attention, and he couldn’t help it anymore. He settled onto the table, elbows on his knees in the lamplight. The cold of the desert pressed in at the windows. The force that called him was running deep, an undercurrent that dragged at his ankles. Keith took a deep breath, then a second, and finally let himself look at Shiro.

He felt his presence like a physical blow. Everything in the world spiralled down into this one point of focus, into the impossibility of it.

He thought of sitting in the vidcom room, gasping his grief into a video message Shiro would never receive.

Shiro had been missing for a year. In that time, Keith had grown a garden in his heart of subtle sorrows, each with its own arrangement of needles and its own rate of decay. They all hurt a little differently. He thought of the bone-weary, lead-veined heaviness of feeding them.

He thought of sitting in the chair that still waited on the little porch and letting the stars blur overhead when the calling was too loud and the pain was too hollow to sleep through.

A year of knowing that Shiro was missing. A year and eight months in which he’d sealed up all the good memories because they’d burned too brightly, and this was a wound he wouldn’t cauterize.

But he was here. Lying on his own couch, sleeping like the dead. Here, alive, unlooked-for. Still impossibly, desperately beloved.

And the memories were coming back.

Shiro when they'd first met, steady and capable. Shiro when they'd first kissed, bright and proud and glowing.

Shiro bringing him here so they could feed their twin hunger by staring up at the stars that called them both.

Shiro, earning his place in history by being the first human being to land on Kerberos. The pride being so fierce in Keith's chest that he'd ached with it.

Everything else was a snarl of grief inside his head. There was no timeline to hold it together. Leaving the Garrison, finding the ship data, yelling at his instructors, saying goodbye. More than a year in the desert. Figuring out how to be on his own again. Staring into the stars alone.

And now, somehow, having lived through all that, Keith was sitting there in the dark, watching over him.

He wasn't the same.

Keith looked at him as a whole, trying not to see anything specific. It didn't quite work. There was that shock of white hair, almost glowing in the faint light from outside, impossible to ignore. There was that scar across his face, the memory of a brutal wound that had long since healed.

There was the arm, lying quietly at his side.

Keith's fingers were knotted around each other. His knuckles were starting to ache with it, but it didn't hurt as much as the ache in his chest.

"What happened to you?" he said, as softly as he could.

Shiro didn't answer. He'd been unconscious since Keith found him; Lance said they'd drugged him. The other two had told him the rest.

He'd been yelling about aliens. He'd said they were on their way. Keith thought about the arrival that was foretold by his research, about Shiro crashing the pod. It had to have come from somewhere. From something. He didn't think Shiro's arrival was the one he was warned about.

His eyes drifted down to Shiro's metal arm and then quickly away again. He'd never seen tech like that. If Shiro was telling the truth, they were all about to be in big trouble.

Suddenly, it was too much. He couldn't stand sitting next to him like this, like he was dying, like he wasn't going to wake up again. Not when he'd spent so long mourning him already.

And, in a corner of his thoughts he was refusing to look at directly, there was the fear that the Shiro who woke would be as changed - as damaged as broken as incomplete, he thought, and wanted to slap himself - as his body.

He hurled himself to his feet, went to the storage shed to find some water. Hunk had returned an hour ago with Shiro's stuff, and now he and Lance were hunkered down together, sleeping. Lance had his arms crossed tightly over his chest, long legs kicked out in front of him. Hunk was snoring gently on his back, head on a wadded up jacket on Lance's lap. The other one - Pudge? Pigeon? - was at the table, head pillowed on his arms.

They were so smudged and soft in the early light that was already leaking in from the world outside. Keith felt a weariness dragging at his skin that had nothing to do with sleep.

Even asleep, the three of them were just enough of a distraction to cause him problems. Without them there, he probably would have noticed the empty couch right away.

But they were, and he only noticed the couch when a pair of hands seized him from behind. His gasp was smothered by the hand that clamped down over his mouth.

"Don't move. Just listen," said Shiro in his ear, and his voice was - different, and not. It was Shiro's, after all this time, after so long thinking he'd never hear it again, and it was so conqueringly familiar that Keith could only freeze. His heart was trying to batter its way out of his chest.

He had a direct view of Lance and Hunk on the floor, and in the dim light he could see that Lance had come awake, and was watching the exchange in tense silence. His eyes were sharp, calculating. But he hadn’t moved. Keith held his gaze, made an almost imperceptible gesture with his free hand. _Stay._

"I don't want to hurt you," Shiro said, "but I need your help."

His human hand was the one over his mouth. Keith tried not to think too hard about the casual strength of the other, where it had his arm twisted behind his back, on the threshold of pain. The cold of the metal bit his skin. Carefully, he nodded, and Shiro let him go.

He turned slowly. Shiro had his back against the wall, and Keith held the water out to him. A ripple fluttered through Shiro, something that might have been a flinch. He eyed the bottle warily and made no move to take it.

"It's okay," Keith said. It had been years since he'd spoken this gently. "Shiro, it's me, it's okay."

Under the ghostly white of his hair, Shiro's eyes darted up to Keith's face, and in that reaction, Keith saw that Shiro didn't recognize him.

Something in his chest cracked, visceral as bone, and burning. The hand holding the water bottle dropped to his side.

But then -

"No...Keith?"

A hesitant flutter, a cautious song. Keith could only nod.

"You're here," Shiro said, uncertain.

"I'm where I've always been," Keith said, and it wasn't quite true but it felt like it was. Whatever had been pulling him to this desert, it had been pulling since before he could articulate it. There was a part of him that was lost and born again here. "It would be more accurate," he said, "to say that you're here."

"I really made it," Shiro said. "This is Earth."

"You made it."

"Are we near the Garrison?"

"When you landed, you were pretty close. We're a ways east, now."

Shiro nodded to himself. "They were the only coordinates I could remember." He seemed to be working something through in his head, and Keith let him. This wasn't the conversation he'd been expecting, wasn't something he knew how to navigate.

Shiro had flinched from him.

Over by the table, the floor groaned as the little guy shifted in his sleep. Shiro's head swivelled towards the sound, but his eyes didn't leave Keith.

It was an animal reaction, the kind you get from being in danger for too long. Listen for the new threat. Keep an eye on the immediate one.

Keith remembered the way Shiro had smiled before Kerberos launched. Easy, utterly confident.

He remembered the last of the ship's logs.

Correlation: fear.

The Shiro who had woken was not the same after all.

"They're from the Garrison, but they're okay," Keith said. "They're just sort of hard to get rid of. I can introduce you when they wake up." He almost cut himself off there, didn't want to ask, but had to. "They said you were trying to warn the Garrison med techs about something. You said someone was coming."

"That was...the Garrison? But they drugged me," Shiro said, frowning.

The two pieces of information didn't seem to make sense to him. Keith couldn't figure it out. He'd long since lost faith in the Garrison's morality. It had been a pretty dramatic shift, too.

And all at once, he understood. Keith had stopped trusting them when they'd blamed Shiro for the crash.

Shiro didn't know.

Maybe he didn't need to. Keith moved them past it. "Shiro. Who's coming?"

"Not someone. Something." He didn't elaborate. He was still leaning back against the wall, and he watched Keith with a desperate edge to his silence.

Keith realized he'd been cataloguing the ways in which Shiro had changed, and had never considered that he might be different, too. Maybe Shiro was seeing something in him that Keith had long since started to ignore.

Shiro gathered himself, visibly squared his shoulders, like bracing for a punch. "Can I go outside?" he said at last, and the fact that he thought he had to ask broke Keith's heart.

"Yeah, Shiro," he said. "Yeah, of course." He evaluated the way Shiro was leaning. "Do you need help?"

"No! No, I -" Shiro stood, braced a hand on the wall, shook his head. Foggy with the sedation still lingering.

"Here -" Keith reached out, and this time Shiro careened away from him, almost fell.

Not even a flinch. Automatic flight response.

Correlation: fear. Keith's stomach twisted.

"Sorry," Shiro said, before Keith could react. "Sorry, here -"

He held a hand out, and Keith took it, slowly pulled Shiro's arm over his shoulders. Lance watched them go in a ready kind of silence, prepared for trouble, prepared to step in. Keith ignored him. Together, he and Shiro navigated around the table, made it to the door. Shiro hesitated for a moment before realizing he was allowed to open it, and his hand reaching for the doorknob was like a prayer suspended, and long overdue.

When they got outside, the sun was still below the horizon. The desert stretched around them, vanishing into the looming nearby cliffs and the endless sky above, strung with stars. At night, the cold was a dry, lung-shrinking torment, and the worst of it was still bleeding off. It made Keith feel awake. Alert. Present.

Shiro stared out at nothing in particular. Keith stared at Shiro.

There was a wonderment on Shiro's face that outstripped everything else, as though he was seeing the sky for the first time, but there was hunger, too. He had been starving for this, Keith thought, and he added it to his list of what he knew about Shiro’s disappearance, hating what his information was starting to guess at.

The mission vanishing in space, and Shiro returning in an escape pod that didn’t come from his ship. The arm, the hair, the scar. The flinching, but also his reactions, more aggressive in a way Keith couldn’t pin down. More focused. And this: asking to go outside, hesitating to open the door, as though he was too used to being contained. Staring up at the sky with this expression, beautiful and heartbreaking.

He saw the pieces, saw where their edges matched up, and he wasn’t ready to see the whole picture. He knew it was selfish, but he didn’t want to know. Not yet.

Not yet.

First, this: standing with Shiro, side by side, both of them staring at something they thought they’d lost forever and had, against all odds, regained.

“I’d forgotten,” Shiro said softly. Keith wasn’t sure he'd meant to say it out loud. “There’s so much I’d...the wind is so - big, and the air, the fresh air, smells - different, it smells - like water, like - ”

Shiro took a deep breath, spine curving, lungs belling out, and then another. He shook on the exhale. His eyes were fixed on the far horizon, a smudgy line in the predawn light, and his free hand crept up to his chest as he kept breathing deeply - faster now, and faster, and his weight dropped more heavily onto Keith, and that was when he got concerned.

“Hey,” he said, “you're gonna pass out, Shiro, come on. Easy. Calm down, I've got you.”

Without a word, Shiro sank to his knees in the sand. Keith went with him, partly out of concern but mostly because Shiro's arm was still around his neck and he wasn’t letting go.

“Shiro, I - ”

He was still breathing hard. Keith twisted, was about to call out for Lance, but Shiro went still, emotion bleeding abruptly out of him. It could have been discipline, but wasn’t; Keith would have recognized Shiro’s old purposefulness, but didn’t. This was too quick, too complete, as though a tether had been cut and now he was simply adrift. His breathing evened out. His eyes hadn’t left the horizon, but Keith didn’t think he was really even seeing it.

This absence was scarier, somehow, than anything that had come before. Keith’s palm itched where it rested on Shiro’s ribs, and he bore the yoke of Shiro’s arm on his neck gladly, wishing it were enough to pull him back to earth, to pull him home.

“Shiro, hey.” He let himself imagine reaching across to push that white hair out of Shiro’s eyes, to brush his thumb over Shiro’s cheekbone. Then he shoved the thought aside - selfish, indulgent. “I’m here to help, okay? Tell me what I can do, tell me what you need.”

He was answered only by the wind. The cliffs nearby were silent, looming shadows, and even now, he could feel the thrum of the inexplicable summons that called him here - that had always called him. That feeling had guided him for so long, had guided him when he was lost and sick with grief, but it couldn't help him here. He pushed a hand through his hair with a sigh, wondering what else he could say, wondering what he could give that would reach across the blankness of Shiro’s expression.

Then, after a full thirty seconds of silence, Shiro’s clenched fist opened, turned palm up on his thigh.

“Sorry,” Shiro said to the horizon. The word bubbled out of him inelegantly, as though dredged up from some unknown depth. His eyes were still very far away. “What was...you asked me something.”

“It can wait,” Keith said, and this caused Shiro’s face to flash with irritation. It slid away, though, slipping beneath the surface with everything else.

“No, you...” Then Shiro bowed his head, curled in on himself. “I know you. You’re safe. This shouldn’t…”

“Hey - it’s alright. We’ll figure it out, okay? I shouldn’t have asked.” He paused, made a gamble. "Shiro, please, come here."

There was a long moment of silent struggle, then. Keith waited, didn't push. And at last, with a great exhale, Shiro seemed to collapse entirely. His whole body turned towards Keith’s, and he tipped into his lap with a sense of inevitability, like a spent swimmer finally letting himself sink. His arms wound around Keith’s waist, face pressed into his stomach. His knees tucked up behind Keith’s back.

Keith held him fiercely, as hard as Shiro was holding him. This had only become a part of their history recently, in the weeks before Kerberos - they'd always sparred a lot, sure, got hands on each other in fights and training. Never casually, never hands on shoulders or legs bumping in the mess hall. Never anything like this, until the day Keith had kissed him.

And Keith had spent months regretting it, wishing he'd been less prickly, that he'd taken the chance to be honest with himself about Shiro sooner, had taken the chance to be softer, kinder. All that wasted time. So long spent defensively ignoring the way Shiro echoed in him like a second heartbeat. He'd spent months thinking that if he'd loved Shiro better, Shiro might, somehow, have come home from Kerberos after all.

This was his chance, and he stood outside himself and knew it, for maybe the first time in his life. Not instinct, but knowledge - Shiro was home, against every hope he'd ever had, and if this was what he needed, Keith would happily provide. He wormed his feet out from under them both and rearranged his legs so that he could sit more comfortably.

“I think this is the first time I've been outside,” Shiro said haltingly. “Since...I can't remember. There's so much I can't remember.”

“You're gonna be okay,” Keith said. “You're here, you made it. I've got you. I'm not gonna let anything hurt you, okay? I've got you.”

“Sorry I can't really...talk, or focus. I was sedated,” said Shiro, and his voice was bleary, slow.

“Sleep if you need to. I'm not going anywhere.” He brushed the tuft of white hair out of Shiro's eyes, and Shiro sighed into the touch. A moment later, he was heavy in Keith's arms, gone back to sleep with the last stars still shining bravely above them.

He wasn't out long. Twenty minutes, maybe half an hour, and by then the sun was rising. It stretched long fingers of gilded light over the desert toward them. Shiro stirred sleepily in his arms, woke by inches. When he cracked an eye and rolled his face up to squint at Keith, he smiled, sheepish, and Keith's heart was a starburst inside of his chest.

“Sorry,” Shiro said, and Keith let him push himself up. “Didn’t mean to trap you.”

“You didn’t,” Keith said firmly.

“Well, thanks for staying with me.” Shiro drew his knees up, hooked his elbows around them, hands clasped. “What now?”

Keith knew he meant the day, the guys sleeping inside, the warning Shiro had so desperately tried to give. He knew it. But he let himself think of how nice it would have been if Shiro had been asking about them instead. Let himself think of answering: more, all, whatever you want, whatever you need.

He kept his eyes on the horizon. He forced his voice to be casual. “There’s clothes inside if you wanna change. They’re yours - I saved them from the incinerator, when you went missing.”

“What, you don’t think this is a good look?” Shiro plucked at his ratty shirt, grin evident in his voice.

Keith stood, brushed the sand off his butt. This was the first glimmer of Shiro's old personality he'd seen, and he wanted to cling to it. “A good look, sure, but not really a good smell.”

“Ooh, low blow.” Keith offered a hand, and Shiro took it, pulling himself to his feet. Once he was standing, he didn’t let go. They started walking down to the house, and Keith didn’t pull away.

If he was right - about where Shiro had been, about what had happened to him - it had been a long time since Shiro had experienced kindness, had been touched gently. He could give that, if Shiro wanted it, if Shiro would accept it. He knew it wouldn’t be all the time. He would teach himself how to navigate with delicacy.

“Oh, I don’t want to go in,” Shiro groaned. “I missed this.”

He was talking about being outside. Probably. Keith’s old wants, long-buried, were being resurrected and were all the stronger for their newness. They were making him misinterpret. He would remember how to dull their edges. He’d done it before. “You can come back out, after. By yourself, if you want.”

Shiro’s eyes slipped from the stars. Keith could feel his gaze upon him, a weight like settling onto safe branches. “That...would be really great,” Shiro said, and his fingers tightened on Keith’s briefly: gratitude. Then he let go. "I can't go back to the Garrison, can I?"

Keith didn't know what to say other than no. If Shiro didn't know that they'd told everyone he was dead, that he'd crashed, this might not be the best time for him to find out.

"I don't know what else to do," Shiro said, a little desperately, and Keith realized he was waiting to be told what their next step was.

Correlation: fear.

Keith wouldn't let him stay afraid if he could help it. He squared up, reached for confidence. If Shiro needed him to lead, he would lead. "We'll wake up the guys inside and figure it out together." He didn't know if they would be a big help, but it sounded like a reasonable thing to do. "You can get changed, get something to eat. There's time. It's still early."

Shiro nodded, let himself be led. Inside, Lance had gone back to sleep, and his head was tipped back awkwardly, mouth hanging open. Keith dug the bag of Shiro's clothes out of the bin Hunk had recovered as silently as he could.

"You even saved my boots," said Shiro, peering into it.

"Yeah, well." Keith slid the lid back onto the bin, checked to make sure he hadn't woken anyone, and when he turned around, Shiro was stripped to the waist.

His back was turned. Even in the half-light, Keith could see that the scar across his face wasn't the only one he'd picked up.

Some were more brutal than others. The biggest carved in just below his ribcage, tapered off just before hitting his spine, but his skin was a patchwork of ruination, of lines crossed and re-crossed. More than one ghostly line came in a set, like claws.

Some were fresher than others. There was a circular one that Keith knew to be a puncture wound just below his shoulder. He would have bet money that it had a twin on the far side. It was still red and raw, only recently closed. And there were others, faded and barely visible. Like the one on his face, some of these were brutal wounds that had long since healed.

They looked older than a year, but what did he know? Up until tonight, he hadn't even known about aliens.

But someone had built him that arm. Someone had done this to him.

And privately, in that moment, Keith decided that he was going to get revenge for every scar, every flinch, every moment that Shiro shut down and went silent, went too deep inside himself to climb out easily.

The moment on the dunes stuck with him. He knew, somehow, that it would happen again, and he would be ready to protect him when it did.

Shiro tugged on his old shirt, his old pants, his old boots. It was a good thing he'd always liked his gym clothes kind of loose, because he'd gained a lot of muscle in the last year. Still, he was starting to look like himself again.

Keith thought he might want to eat, but Shiro's eyes were stuck on the windows, on the sun rising over the sand.

"Go ahead, if you want. I'll give you some space."

Shiro hesitated, dragged his eyes from the window to Keith. "Will you come get me when everyone wakes up?"

Keith nodded, and Shiro went, and Keith watched him go, trying to tell himself it was nothing like the last time Shiro had walked away from him. This was nothing to worry about.

Outside, Shiro trudged to the top of the dune. He folded his arms, dug his fingers into his sides, held on. And he tipped his face up to the sky and stood there in the cold morning sunlight, letting gravity sink back in.

It was nothing like last time. He wasn't leaving.

This time, at last, he was coming home.

Whatever happened next - with the Garrison boys, with Shiro's warning, with the arrival from Keith's research, with the calling that still pulled him into the desert - at least Shiro was safe.

It wouldn't last forever, but Keith had always been a creature of teeth. Maybe whatever Shiro ran from should learn to fear him instead.

Overhead, the last of the stars were fading. The voice from the desert pulled at him, louder and clearer than ever.

Now, it seemed to say. Now. Now.

And Keith, without quite knowing why, glanced over at the green guy's sketchbook.

It had shifted when he'd fallen asleep on it; the page with the diagram of Shiro's arm was curled to the side.

On the page beneath it, there was a doodle of a lion.

The caged bird in his chest burst free.

And the calling, for the first time in his life, stopped entirely.

 


End file.
